Edwin Van Der Sar's Retirement

The Man Who Changed The Game Of Soccer

He also had the perfect keeper’s temperament. The Dutch call him an ijs konijn, an “ice rabbit.” This goalkeeper isn’t crazy. He says: "I sometimes see nice, quiet boys go nuts on the pitch. Then I think, people can say I’m a 'dead one,' but I don’t think those guys are 100 percent." Van der Sar rebuffs the emotion around him with a chilled irony that usually falls short of being funny.

Lastly, there was his shape: perfect for modern soccer. The big, burly English keeper, who could push his way through a crowded penalty area to a cross (think Arsenal’s David Seaman), was becoming extinct by the 1990s. Even in England, referees were no longer letting forwards push and foul anymore. In the new, genteel game, Seamans were redundant. The new model keeper had to be a giant gymnast — a rare phenomenon. Van der Sar is it.

By age 24, he was Holland’s automatic No. 1 and had won the Champions League with Ajax in 1995. In 1999, he joined Juventus. The story goes that as he waited in Amsterdam airport to fly to Italy to sign, his phone rang. It was Alex Ferguson. Did van der Sar fancy joining Manchester United, one of soccer's biggest brands? The keeper apologized; he’d already said yes to Juventus. For years afterward, as United kept signing substandard keepers, Ferguson would regret having called van der Sar a day late.

Van der Sar probably regretted it too. At Juventus, for the only time in his career, he lost confidence and committed what the Italians called papere — keeper’s errors. Juventus had his eyes tested. In 2001, it dispatched him to the west London neighborhood club Fulham.

A downward trend

In Dublin on September 1, 2001, I witnessed van der Sar’s nadir. Holland lost to Ireland and missed qualifying for the 2002 World Cup. Afterward, the keeper strode off in what, by his standards, was a state of emotion. He passed a small table that stood beside the field. It looked doomed. He lifted a long leg to administer the coup de grace. But then, instead of shattering the table, he lifted his leg an inch higher and merely flicked a plastic cup off the tabletop. That was van der Sar: the ice rabbit with perfect footwork.

But his best seemed past. The former world’s greatest goalkeeper spent four years at Fulham. Meanwhile, Manchester United and Arsenal soldiered on with substandard keepers. Whereas in Holland, a keeper was expected to be an outfield player, and in Italy, an infallible shot-stopper, in England, little seemed expected of him at all. Most managers undervalue and misunderstand goalkeepers. When the sports economist Bernd Frick studied salaries in Germany’s Bundesliga, he found that keepers earned less than outfield players, despite mostly being older. Perhaps the main reason is managerial ignorance: Even great managers like Ferguson or Arsene Wenger view keeping as an alien craft, like flower arranging. Barely understanding what keepers do, they are loath to pay much for them.

Finally, in 2005, Ferguson gambled just under $4 million on van der Sar. The keeper was surprised. At 34, well past the optimal age for most players, he had thought his career was winding down. He was looking forward to returning to his amateur club and playing center forward. "Scoring goals is the most fun," he said.

How did van der Sar only realize his best at a late age? That's next...